Food cooking is a tedious process that involves multiple steps and skills. Professional chefs can create delicious meals from creative uses of ingredients (e.g. herbs, spices, and condiments) and food items (e.g. meats, and vegetables). Consumers usually cook meals by following recipes.
Food cooking processes usually involves the following steps: (1) preparing food items into desired shapes and sizes, (2) assembling all food items and ingredients into desired amounts, and (3) cooking the prepared food items and ingredients with some form of heating by adding the prepared items in a certain sequence. In step (1), food items are washed, cut and chopped into desired sizes. In step (2), all the required ingredients are brought together in certain quantities to create tasty meals. In step (3), the prepared items are put together manually. This step involves mixing the prepared items in a cooking medium such as pan or pot.
There exist cooking devices that can cook certain recipes with minimum effort. For example, slow cookers can reduce work in step (3). But, only certain types of meals can be cooked with slow cookers. There exist programmable slower cookers that allow for the setting of cooking temperatures and times. Cooking with slow cookers still requires the execution of steps (1) and (2).
Also available are convenient pre-cooked and frozen food packages. This form of food cooking removes steps (1) and (2) from the process as the food items are already prepared. Step (3) may be partially completed before a package is made available to consumers.
Food items in the package may be pre-cooked. As a result, cooking requires minimum efforts and less time. However, nutritional value and taste degrade with this form of cooking. Most prepackaged food contains preservatives. Partially cooked food that is stored for a lengthy period of time tends to lose nutrients and is characterized by a degraded flavor.
There also exist fully automatic commercial- or industrial-style cooking devices that can perform all steps (1), (2) and (3) or steps (2) and (3) in an automated manner. However, such devices tend to be unnecessarily complicated. They are not suitable for consumer use and do not add convenience, and most of them are impractical.